Are or should the assumptions, methods, and aims of philosophy be scientific or humanistic? I take Quine to represent the view that if philosophy is done as it should be, it is scientific. A contrary view is that philosophy rightly pursued is humanistic. I consider Williams' defense of it. My aim in this paper is to show that each view is partly right and partly wrong and to propose an alternative that includes what I take to be right and excludes (...) what I take to be wrong in both views. (shrink)

My thesis is that contemporary ethics needs to reconceptualize its notion of the "ethical subject/agent." In developing this argument, I draw on three sources: (1) the field of moral psychology, (2) philosophical explorations of the concepts of "moral responsibility" and "moral community, and (3) the work of American philosophers such as Josiah Royce and John Dewey. Primary attention will be given to the latter two sources, though, given the short span of this essay, only brief references to Royce and Dewey (...) are possible, even though these philosophers provide the foundational theoretical framework for any reconceptualization efforts. Indeed, these philosophers, as well as William James, engaged in and drew upon .. (shrink)

Currently popular theories of epistemic responsibility rest on the assumption that justification and excuse exhaust the relevant normative categories. One gets the sense that, once we've laid down the conditions for justified belief, and once we've laid down the conditions of excusably unjustified belief, the work is done; all that's left is to clock out. Against this backdrop, one is naturally led to think that if an agent's doxastic state fails to be justified, it is thereby unjustified, perhaps excusably so. (...) The aim of this paper is to argue that that natural thought is mistaken; some agents are epistemically incompetent, and in virtue of their incompetence, their doxastic states are neither justified nor unjustified. Instead, the doxastic states of such agents are exempt from epistemic evaluation altogether. I argue that what underlies this point about exemptions is that epistemic competences or abilities play an important and typically overlooked role in epistemology, especially in theories of epistemic responsibility. Here, I am interested in uncovering that role and explaining what it is, and also in explaining how one could accommodate it within various epistemological frameworks. (shrink)

I argue that no one knows whether there is free will.

It is an assumption widely shared by both retributivists and anti-retributivists that revenge is a morally impermissible basis for inflicting harm. Retributivists have thus exercised great ingenuity in demonstrating that retribution is fundamentally different from revenge. But this is, I argue, to misconstrue the problem. The problem is rather to recognize the essential continuity between revenge and retribution, and to address the question whether there is a moral basis for the very idea of inflicting harm in response to moral wrongdoing. (...) I argue that the only plausible such moral justification is the defense of honor, and that the debate needs to be focused on the legitimacy of honor as a moral basis for punishment. (shrink)

Over the past few years, a number of authors in the new field of neuroethics have claimed that there is an ethical challenge presented by the likelihood that the findings of neuroscience will undermine many common assumptions about human agency and selfhood. These authors claim that neuroscience shows that human agents have no free will, and that our sense of being a “self” is an illusory construction of our brains. Furthermore, some commentators predict that our ethical practices of assigning moral (...) blame, or of recognizing others as persons rather than as objects, will change as a result of neuroscientific discoveries that debunk free will and the concept of the self. I contest suggestions that neuroscience’s conclusions about the illusory nature of free will and the self will cause significant change in our practices. I argue that we have self-interested reasons to resist allowing neuroscience to determine core beliefs about ourselves. (shrink)

In recent years, compatibilism has been the target of two powerful challenges. According to the consequence argument, if everything we do and think is a consequence of factors beyond our control (past events and the laws of nature), and the consequences of what is beyond our control are themselves beyond our control, then no one has control over what they do or think and no one is responsible for anything. Hence, determinism rules out responsibility. A different challenge--here called the manipulation (...) argument--is that by allowing agents to be fully determined compatibilist accounts of practical freedom and responsibility are unable to preclude those who are subject to global manipulation from being free and responsible. (shrink)

Over the past five decades, I have been developing a distinctive view of free will according to which it requires that agents be to some degree ultimately responsible for the formation of their own wills. To act ‘of one's own free will’ in this sense is to act ‘from a will’ that is to some extent ‘of one's own free making’. A free will of this ultimate kind has been under attack in the modern era as obscure and unintelligible. In (...) this paper, I discuss the arguments for such a view and compare it to other contemporary views of free will and action. I then address criticisms that such a non‐determinist free will cannot be made intelligible or reconciled with modern science, does not allow sufficient agent control, reduces to mere chance or luck or randomness, leads to various regresses, or fails to account for moral responsibility, among other criticisms. (shrink)

Nichols’ Bound presents interesting new angles on traditional debates about free will and moral responsibility, relating them to the latest empirical research in psychology, social sciences and experimental philosophy. In experimental philosophy, he cites numerous recent studies showing that there are strong incompatibilist strands in folk intuitions about free will and responsibility, taking issue with other recent studies claiming that folk intuitions are predominantly compatibilist. But he also argues that incompatibilist folk intuitions are based on faulty reasoning and cannot be (...) realized. We are left with a choice between an eliminativism about free will and moral responsibility or revising ordinary beliefs and practices in a compatibilist direction. Though Nichols sees problems with both these positions, he ultimately opts for the latter. Despite agreeing with Nichols on many points, I argue in this paper that he takes the libertarian view of free will off the table too precipitously, leaving us with too narrow a choice of options. I argue that we can make sense of an incompatibilist view of free will and responsibility without reducing it to mere chance or mystery and that it remains an open scientific question whether we can have such a free will. (shrink)

In this paper, I present and defend a novel version of the Reactive Attitude account of moral blameworthiness. In Section 1, I introduce the Reactive Attitude account and outline Allan Gibbard's version of it. In Section 2, I present the Wrong Kind of Reasons Problem, which has been at the heart of much recent discussion about the nature of value, and explain why a reformulation of it causes serious problems for versions of the Reactive Attitude account such as Gibbard's. In (...) Section 3, I consider some ways in which Gibbard might attempt to avoid the Wrong Kind of Reason Problem. I argue that all of these ways fail to achieve their aim and further contend that the Wrong Kind of Reason Problem cannot be solved in a sufficiently convincing manner by the widely used method of making ad hoc distinctions among kinds of properties, kinds of attitudes, and kinds of reasons. In Section 4, I sketch my own version of the Reactive Attitude account of moral blameworthiness and show that it simply avoids the Wrong Kind of Reason Problem rather than attempting to solve the problem on a piecemeal basis. (shrink)

Der Beitrag entwickelt ein neues, machtbasiertes Verantwortungsmodell für die individuelle Verstrickung in globale strukturelle Ungerechtigkeiten. Er geht von dem Problem aus, dass die meisten Bedingungen für die Zuerkennung moralischer Haftbarkeitsverantwortung in Fällen der individuellen Verstrickung in globale strukturelle Übel nicht erfüllt sind: Wenn eine Person beispielsweise ein unter ausbeuterischen Bedingungen produziertes T-Shirt kauft, so ist diese Handlung für das Eintreten der strukturellen Ungerechtigkeit weder hinreichend noch notwendig, die Person hat die strukturell ungerechten Eff ekte ihrer Handlung häufi g nicht intendiert (...) und kann die Folgen ihrer Handlungen epistemisch nicht ausreichend gut überblicken. Nicht zuletzt ist ihre Partizipation an der kapitalistischen Weltwirtschaftsordnung unfreiwillig. Der Beitrag diskutiert, welche Lösung Iris Marion Young in ihrem Modell kollektiv geteilter Verantwortung für dieses Problem vorgeschlagen hat, und argumentiert, dass hier insbesondere in Hinblick auf das Kriterium der kausalen Relevanz Probleme bestehen bleiben. Davon ausgehend schlägt der Beitrag ein ergänzendes, machttheoretisch begründetes Modell der Zuerkennung moralischer Haftbarkeitsverantwortung vor: Verantwortung wird diesem zufolge nicht nur in Bezug auf einzelne Handlungen konzeptualisiert, sondern auch in Bezug auf die strukturell generierte und generalisierte Handlungsfähigkeit, die Personen aufgrund ihres Status in Regelsystemen gegenüber anderen Personen besitzen. In diesem Sinne wird einzelnen Personen Verantwortung nicht nur für die kausalen Eff ekte ihrer Handlungen, sondern bereits für die kausalen Eff ekte der Annahme ihrer sozialen Macht über andere übertragen. Ich argumentiere, dass Personen für ihre soziale Macht gegenüber anderen verantwortlich gemacht werden können, weil diese Macht die generalisierte Vorbedingung ihrer individuellen Handlungsfähigkeit darstellt und weil sie ihre sozial konstituierte Handlungsfähigkeit durch jegliches Handeln implizit annehmen. Soziale Macht wird Personen durch soziale Regeln übertragen: Auch dominierende Macht besitzt jemand, ohne dafür notwendigerweise etwas tun zu müssen. Sobald eine Person ausgehend von ihrer sozialen Macht handelt, reproduziert sie damit notwendigerweise die sozialen Konstitutionsbedingungen ihrer Macht über andere. Genauer stellt die Annahme ihrer sozialen Macht eine NESS-Bedingung in Hinblick auf die Reproduktion derjenigen strukturell ungerechten sozialen Regeln dar, die ihr Macht erst übertragen haben. Dabei können Personen meistens vorhersehen, dass die Annahme ihrer sozialen Macht, d.h. ihrer sozialen Statusfunktionen globale strukturelle Ungerechtigkeiten auf kausal relevante Art und Weise reproduziert. Obwohl die Annahme sozialer Statusfunktionen normalerweise unfreiwillig ist, kann Personen für diese kompensatorische Verantwortung übertragen werden, insofern sie die ungerechten Effekte dieser Annahme vorhersehen können. Da die Effekte unserer Statusannahme kausal und epistemisch kollektiv geteilt sind, schlage ich vor, diese Form der Verantwortung als eine kollektiv-geteilte zu verstehen. Um strukturellen Ungerechtigkeiten abzuhelfen, müssen Personen entsprechend dazu beitragen, handlungsfähige kollektive Akteure – d.h. gerechte politische Institutionen – zu bilden. (shrink)

In Andrea Sangiovanni’s words, practice-dependent theorists hold that “[t]he content, scope, and justification of a conception of [a given value] depends on the structure and form of the practices that the conception is intended to govern”. They have tended to present this as methodologically innovative, but here I point to the similarities between the methodological commitments of contemporary practice-dependent theorists and others, particularly P. F. Strawson in his Freedom and Resentment and Bernard Williams in general. I suggest that by looking (...) at what Strawson and Williams did, we can add to the reasons for adopting one form or another of practice-dependence. The internal complexity of the practices we hope our principles will govern may require it. However, this defence of practice-dependence also puts pressure on self-identified practice-dependence theorists, suggesting that they need to do more work to justify the interpretations of the practices their theories rely on. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Adorno's metacritique of freedom in Negative Dialectics and related texts remains fruitful today. I begin with some background on Adorno's conception of ‘metacritique’ and on Kant's conception of freedom, as I understand it. Next, I discuss Adorno's analysis of the experiential content of Kantian freedom, according to which Kant has reified the particular social experience of the early modern bourgeoisie in his conception of unconditioned freedom. Adorno argues against this conception of freedom and suggests (...) that freedom is always conditioned by our embodiment and by our social and historical situation. Finally, I turn to Adorno's criticism of Kant's discussion of freedom and determinism in the Critique of Pure Reason and argue that while his philosophical argument against Kant fails, his metacritical argument remains suggestive. Scepticism about freedom arises when the standpoint of theoretical reason encroaches upon the standpoint of practical reason and assimilates persons to things. (shrink)

According to Mellor, we know what an experience is like if we can imagine it correctly, and we will do so if we recognise the experience as it is imagined. This paper identifies a constraint on adequate accounts of how we ordinarily imagine experiences correctly: the capacities to imagine and to recognise the experience must be jointly operative at the point of forming an intention to imagine the experience. The paper develops an account of imagining experiences correctly that meets this (...) constraint in terms of the subject's possession of a concept of the experience. The account implies that the imagination is active in conscious perception. (shrink)

This essay aims to develop the so-called ‘transformational view’ of human development (advocated by McDowell and Bakhurst) by advancing a play-based model of learning. I first consider challenges to this view posed by Luntley and Rödl who argue that the learning encounter must presuppose some rational faculty already present in the prelinguistic child. Rödl in particular considers joint attentional episodes in which child and adult attend to objects in their environment together as signifying a uniquely rational consciousness active in the (...) human child. I however argue on phenomenological grounds that this intellectualist treatment is implausible and unconvincing. I propose a play-centered treatment (inspired primarily from Huizinga) that is more sensitive to the life of the child. This perspective of play I maintain scaffolds a shared normative space which enables self-conscious, responsive, and intelligible thought and action. This account motivates what I call a participatory play model of learning which is constitutively non-intellectual but is nonetheless intelligent. It is non-intellectual because it emphasizes building co-reactive relationships and participation in shared cultural practices. But it is also intelligent because it makes possible a distinctively human mode of understanding grounded on an interactive, relational, and imaginatively reflexive engagement with the world. (shrink)

Advice-giving is an important means of supporting others to act well. It inspires gratitude, indifference and resentment in equal measure. Although we can often predict a resentful reception for advice, its normative implications may be unclear. Should advice that is likely to be resented be withheld or modified because of its resentability, or delivered despite it? The norms that underwrite advice-giving, and which inform justified resentment, have thus far evaded systematic philosophical analysis. Using a case proposed by Edward Hinchman, the (...) first part of this paper develops three lines of reasoning that explain why advice might be resented. The second part explores three norms of advice suggested by the case. Together they cast light upon the role of advice in our moral and social lives, and offer a starting point for practical reasoning about when to give resentable advice, and how to be a good advisor. (shrink)

Harming other people is prima facie wrong. Unless we can be very certain that doing so is justified under the circumstances, we ought not to do it. In this paper, I argue that we ought to dismantle harsh retributivist criminal justice systems for this reason; we cannot be sufficiently certain that the harm is justified. Gregg Caruso, Ben Vilhauer and others have previously argued for the same conclusion; however, my own version sidesteps certain controversial premises of theirs. Harsh retributivist criminal (...) justice can only be morally right if the following three propositions are true: Moral responsibility exists, retributivism is right, and we can find out how much punishment offenders deserve for their crimes. Suppose that we initially assign a high credence to each of the three propositions; I assume for the sake of argument that there are good arguments in support of each. Nevertheless, these arguments ultimately depend on intuitions. Since we have philosophical peers whose intuitions differ from ours, we ought to downgrade our credence in each. However, even slightly less credence in each proposition means far less credence in a conjunction of all three. Since the stakes are high and there are morally safer options for a criminal justice system, we ought to dismantle harsh retributivist ones. (shrink)

One of the most influential arguments against compatibilism is Derk Pereboom’s four-case manipulation argument. Professor Plum, the main character of the thought experiment, is manipulated into doing what he does; he therefore supposedly lacks moral responsibility for his action. Since he is arguably analogous to an ordinary agent under determinism, Pereboom concludes that ordinary determined agents lack moral responsibility as well. I offer a hard-line reply to this argument, that is, a reply which denies that this kind of manipulation is (...) responsibility undermining. I point out that fully fleshed-out manipulated characters in fiction can seem morally responsible for what they do. This is plausibly because we identify with such characters, and therefore focus on their options and the reasons for which they act rather than the manipulation. I further argue that we ought to focus this way when interacting with other agents. We have no reason to trust the incompatibilist intuitions that arise when we regard manipulated agents from a much more detached perspective. (shrink)

In this paper, I review arguments according to which harsh criminal punishments and poverty are undeserved and therefore unjust. Such arguments come in different forms. First, one may argue that no one deserves to be poor or be punished, because there is no such thing as desert-entailing moral responsibility. Second, one may argue that poor people in particular do not deserve to remain in poverty or to be punished if they commit crimes, because poor people suffer from psychological problems that (...) undermine their agency and moral responsibility. Third, one may argue that poor and otherwise marginalized people frequently face external obstacles that prevent them from taking alternative courses of action. The first kind of argument has its place in the philosophy seminar. Psychological difficulties may be important to attend to both in personal relationships and when holding ourselves responsible. Nevertheless, I argue that neither type of argument belongs in political contexts. Moral responsibility scepticism ultimately rests on contested intuitions. Labelling certain groups of people particularly irrational, weak-willed, or similar is belittling and disrespectful; such claims are also hard to prove, and may have the opposite effect to the intended one on people's attitudes. Arguments from external obstacles have none of these problems. Such arguments may not take us all the way to criminal justice reform, but in this context, we can supplement them with epistemic arguments and crime prevention arguments. (shrink)

In this paper, I describe a hitherto overlooked kind of practical irrationality, which I call irrational option exclusion. An agent who suffers from this problem does not merely fail to act on her best judgement – she fails to realize that the superior action is even an option for her. I furthermore argue that this kind of irrationality is serious enough to undermine moral responsibility. I show that an agent suffering from this problem has compromised reasons-responsiveness, does not really express (...) her will through action, and has a hard time doing otherwise; thus, from the standpoint of several popular moral responsibility theories, we ought to conclude that her responsibility is at the very least diminished. (shrink)

There are powerful arguments for free will scepticism. However, it seems obvious that some of our actions are done of our own free will. It has been argued that we can solve this puzzle by giving ‘free’ a contextualist analysis. In everyday contexts we are often allowed to ignore sceptical arguments, and can truly say that we acted freely. In the more demanding context of philosophy, it is true that we never do anything freely. Our freedom is elusive; it escapes (...) us as soon as sceptical arguments are brought up. This kind of freedom contextualism has been criticized for conceding too much to the sceptic. Furthermore, it has problematic implications for moral responsibility. I develop an alternative contextualist analysis of ‘free’, according to which it is proper in certain contexts to ignore sceptical arguments even if they are brought up. Ignoring them is proper when doing so is necessary for engaging in an activity that is obviously justified. I argue that engaging in deliberation and inter-agential interaction with other people are obviously justified activities that require ignoring sceptical arguments. In these contexts, we do have a non-elusive kind of freedom. (shrink)

When interacting with other people, we assume that they have their reasons for what they do and believe, and experience recognizable feelings and emotions. When people act from weakness of will or are otherwise irrational, what they do can still be comprehensible to us, since we know what it is like to fall for temptation and act against one’s better judgment. Still, when someone’s experiences, feelings and way of thinking is vastly different from our own, understanding them becomes increasingly difficult. (...) Delusions and psychosis are often seen as marking the end of intelligibility. In this paper, I argue first for the importance of seeing other people as intelligible as long as this is at all possible. Second, I argue, based on both previous literature and my own lived experience, that more psychotic phenomena than previously thought can be rendered at least somewhat intelligible. Besides bizarre experiences like illusions, hallucinations and intense feelings of significance, I also explain what it is like to lose one’s bedrock, and how this loss impacts which beliefs one has reason to reject. Finally, I give an inside account of some disturbances of reason, and show that there are important similarities between certain psychotic reasoning problems and common non-pathological phenomena. (shrink)

I defend an instrumentalist account of moral responsibility and adopt Manuel Vargas’ idea that our responsibility practices are justified by their effects. However, whereas Vargas gives an independent account of morally responsible agency, on my account, responsible agency is defined as the susceptibility to developing and maintaining moral agency through being held responsible. I show that the instrumentalism I propose can avoid some problems more crude forms of instrumentalism encounter by adopting aspects of Strawsonian accounts. I then show the implications (...) for our understanding of responsibility: my account requires us to adopt a graded notion of responsibility and accept the claim that certain individuals may not be responsible because they are not susceptible to being influenced by our moral responsibility practices. Finally, I discuss whether the account is committed to allowing the instrumentalization of non-responsible individuals in cases where blaming them may benefit others’ moral agency. (shrink)

In this paper we articulate and diagnose a previously unrecognized problem for theories of entitlement, what we call the Claims Conundrum. It applies to all entitlements that are originally generated by some claim-generating action, such as laboring, promising, or contract-signing. The Conundrum is spurred by the very plausible thought that a later claim to the object to which one is entitled is a function of whether that original claim-generating action is attributable to one. This is further assumed to depend on (...) one’s being identical to the person who performed the claim-generating action. But the right theory of personal identity for grounding these later claims proves quite elusive. In demonstrating both the Claims Conundrum and diagnosing its source, we begin with its instantiation in John Locke’s theories of personal identity and initial acquisition, and then we gradually expand its net to include both Lockean and non-Lockean theories of both, moving ultimately to show that this is a problem for most entitlements generally. We then diagnose the source of the trouble, showing that a basic assumption about the link between attributability and identity that most people take to be obvious is in fact false, clearing a path for future investigation into this overlooked but serious problem’s resolution. (shrink)

In recent years, scholars have become increasingly interested in reconstructing a Buddhist stance on the free will problem. Since then, Buddhism has been variously described as implicitly hard determinist, paleo-compatibilist, neo-compatibilist and libertarian. Some scholars, however, question the legitimacy of Buddhist free will theorizing, arguing that Buddhism does not share sufficiently many presuppositions required to articulate the problem. This paper argues that, though Buddhist and Western versions of the free will problem are not perfectly isomorphic, a problem analogous to that (...) expressed in Western philosophy emerges within the Buddhist framework. This analogous problem concerns the difficulty of explaining karmic responsibility in a world governed by dependent origination. This paper seeks to reconstruct an approach to free will consistent with Madhyamaka philosophy and, in so doing, to demonstrate that the mutual exclusivity of positions such as hard determinism and libertarianism is, from the Madhyamaka perspective, merely superficial. By building on the perspectivalist theory advanced by Daniel Breyer, it is clear that a Madhyamaka stance on free will demands the wholesale abandonment of perspectives, such that the idea of any one solution as definitive is disavowed. Taken to its logical conclusion, therefore, perspectivalism entails the relative truth of perspectivalism itself. (shrink)

This paper gives an account of the argument of Schopenhauer's essay On the Freedom of the Human Will, drawing also on his other works. Schopenhauer argues that all human actions are causally necessitated, as are all other events in empirical nature, hence there is no freedom in the sense of liberum arbitrium indifferentiae. However, our sense of responsibility or agency (being the ) is nonetheless unshakeable. To account for this Schopenhauer invokes the Kantian distinction between empirical and intelligible characters. The (...) paper highlights divergences between Schopenhauer and Kant over the intelligible character, which for Schopenhauer can be neither rational nor causal. It raises the questions whether the intelligible character may be redundant to Schopenhauer's position, and whether it can coherently belong to an individual agent, suggesting that for Schopenhauer a more consistent position would have been to deny freedom of will to the individual. (shrink)

In his seminal paper ‘Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility’, Harry Frankfurt argues against the principle of alternate possibilities (PAP)—the principle that persons are morally responsible for what they have done only if they could have done otherwise—by presenting a case in which, apparently, a person is morally responsible for what he has done even though, due to the presence of a counterfactual intervener, he could not have done otherwise. According to a compelling (yet relatively under-discussed) response to Frankfurt’s attack on (...) PAP, Frankfurt has not succeeded in showing that the principle is false, since in the scenario he asks us to imagine the agent has an alternate possibility: he can (unwittingly) force the intervener’s hand by revising his decision to perform the action in question and thereby avoid performing the action himself. This response to Frankfurt has been objected to, however, on the grounds that the agent does not avoid performing the action since the intervener acts upon an involuntary prior sign. The goal of this article is to show that this objection fails. While it is true that the prior sign upon which the intervener acts is involuntary, it is a consequence of a change of mind that is voluntary. It follows that the agent does what is needed to avoid performing the action in question (in the counterfactual sequence). (shrink)

Williams Syndrome provides a striking test case for discourses on disability, because the characteristics associated with Williams Syndrome involve a combination of “abilities” and “disabilities”. For example, Williams Syndrome is associated with disabilities in mathematics and spatial cognition. However, Williams Syndrome individuals also tend to have a unique strength in their expressive language skills, and are socially outgoing and unselfconscious when meeting new people. Children with Williams are said to be typically unafraid of strangers and show a greater interest in (...) contact with adults than with their peers. This apparently keen social knowledge is a counterexample to the discussion of disability among academic philosophers, especially philosophers of the early modern period. Locke infamously used the example of disability to claim that Descartes’ arguments in favor of innate ideas were incorrect. On the contrary, Williams Syndrome may stand as an example of innate social knowledge; something that could benefit current discourse in philosophy, disability theory, and medical ethics. (shrink)

Akeel Bilgrami has always argued that the contents of our thoughts are constitutively constrained by what we could be said to know about them. In earlier work he explained this in terms of a connection between thought and rationality, but his recent book argues that the ultimate ground for self-knowledge rests in our notion of responsibility. This paper will examine these arguments, and suggest that if Bilgrami is right about how self-knowledge is grounded, then it need not constrain our content (...) ascriptions as thoroughly as he once proposed that it must. (shrink)

Civics can be distinguished from policy. Civics concerns basic principles and institutions of political and legal order. Policy concerns specific ways in which particular ends are pursued by the st...

Radical moral encroachment is the view that belief itself is morally evaluable, and that some moral properties of belief itself make a difference to epistemic rationality. To date, almost all proponents of radical moral encroachment hold to an asymmetry thesis: the moral encroaches on rational belief, but not on rational credence. In this paper, we argue against the asymmetry thesis; we show that, insofar as one accepts the most prominent arguments for radical moral encroachment on belief, one should likewise accept (...) radical moral encroachment on credence. We outline and reject potential attempts to establish a basis for asymmetry between the attitude types. Then, we explore the merits and demerits of the two available responses to our symmetry claim: (i) embracing moral encroachment on credence and (ii) denying moral encroachment on belief. (shrink)

The love that we feel for our friends plays an essential role in both our moral motivation to act towards them; and in our moral obligations towards them, that is, in our special duties. We articulate our proposal as a reply to Stephen Darwall’s second-person proposal, which we take to be a contemporary representative of the Kantian view. According to this view, love does not have a necessary role neither in moral motivation, nor in moral obligation; just a complementary one. (...) Yet this proposal faces three difficulties: a psychological problem, a practical problem, and a theoretical problem. In contrast, we argue that both moral motivation, and moral obligations emerge from our interpersonal relations with particular others. We further argue that obligations in the context of friendship are moral because they come with a feeling of obligation and have been internalized. Thus, the three problems raised to the Kantian position are clarified, and the role of love is emphasized in both our moral motivation, and our moral obligations towards friends. (shrink)

Building on the discussion between Stephen Darwall and Michael Tomassello, we propose an alternative evolutionary account of moral motivation in its two-pronged dimension. We argue that an evolutionary account of moral motivation must account for the two forms of moral motivation that we distinguish: motivation to be partial, which is triggered by the affective relationships we develop with others; and motivation to be impartial, which is triggered by those norms to which we give impartial validity. To that aim, we present (...) the second-person standpoint of morality, first as Darwall conceives of it, and then as we reinterpret it from a naturalistic approach. Then we synthesize Tomasello’s evolutionary account of morality, and Darwall’s objections to it. To reply to those objections, building on Tomasello’s proposal, we argue that the motivation to be impartial, and the feeling of obligation to comply with normative requirements, appeared when humans anticipated and, critically, internalized others’ sanctions to the violation of social norms. Consequently, we posit that social norms and sanctions appeared first at the community level, and only after that were they internalized in the form of self-directed reactive attitudes. Finally, we derive some corollaries that follow from our proposal. (shrink)

The article develops the thesis that spiritual objectivity constitutes an independent class of phenomena besides the physical and the mental. The concept of spiritual objectivity presents a solution for the mediation between the bodily and the conscious by further developing the insight of critical monism that individual action can neither be subsumed under the phenomena of the bodily outer world nor under the phenomena of the mental inner world. Referring to Gottlob Frege's thesis that what distinguishes a thought from other (...) phenomena is its capability of being true, the article develops the argument that the thought in its spiritual objectivity should be distinguished from the psychic inner world of ideas as well as from the physical exterior world of material objects. The possibility of rational recognition is dependent upon this genuinely spiritual mediation of inner and outer world, and its objective truth must be distinguished from the constitutive subjectivity of psychic phenomena. This specified concept of the spiritual is not intended to enlarge the substance dualism between the bodily and the mental once again but makes it possible to determine the in itself differentiated unity of the bodily and the mental, namely as spiritual unity of body and mind. (shrink)

Common-sense morality divides acts into those that are right and those that are wrong, but it thinks some wrong acts are more seriously wrong than others, for example murder than breaking a promise. If an act is more seriously wrong, you should feel more guilt about it and, other things equal, are more blameworthy for it and can deserve more punishment; more serious wrongs are also more to be avoided given empirical or moral uncertainty. This paper examines a number of (...) different views about what makes for more serious wrongness and considers the possibility that this may be different for acts that violate deontological vs. consequentialist duties. It also asks whether there’s a parallel concept that admits of degrees on the side of rightness, one of being, as we can say, more importantly right. (shrink)

In this review, I offer an overview of of the questions that caught my attention while reading Neuroexistentialism. I aim to make it clear why the issues that are raised in this volume are worth exploring in more detail. I also hope to clarify the limitations that are imposed by neural and social constraints, and to recommend ways of anchoring a third wave of existentialism in our understanding of neuroscience, our expanding sense of cultural variation, and our emerging recognition of (...) the contingency of even our most deeply sedimented ways of perceiving and acting in the world. (shrink)

Thought experimental methods play a central role in empirical moral psychology. Against the increasingly common interpretation of recent experimental data, I argue that such methods cannot demonstrate that moral intuitions are produced by reflexive computations that are implicit, fast, and largely automatic. I demonstrate, in contrast, that evaluating thought experiments occurs at a near-glacial pace relative to the speed at which reflexive information processing occurs in a human brain. So, these methods allow for more reflective and deliberative processing than has (...) commonly been assumed. However, these methods may still provide insight into some human strategies for navigating unfamiliar moral dilemmas. (shrink)

The normative notion of fittingness figures saliently in the work of a number of ethical theorists writing in the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries and has in recent years regained prominence, occupying an important place in the theoretical tool kits of a range of contemporary writers. Yet the notion remains strikingly undertheorized. This article offers a (partial) remedy. I proceed by canvassing a number of attempts to analyze the fittingness relation in other terms, arguing that none is fully adequate. In (...) explaining why various analyses of fittingness fail, I draw into relief certain of the relation’s constitutive features and spotlight some of its interesting and important connections to various other properties. Along the way, I highlight the relation’s relevance to a number of ongoing debates in normative and metanormative philosophy. I conclude by indicating some directions for further research. (shrink)

Avishai Margalit, The Decent Society (translated by Naomi Goldblum).

I argue that free will is a nominal construct developed and deployed post hoc in an effort to provide cohesive narratives in support of a priori moral-judgmental dispositions. In a reversal of traditional course, I defend the view that there are no circumstances under which attributions of moral responsibility for an act can, should, or do depend on prior ascriptions of free will. Conversely, I claim that free will belief depends entirely on the apperceived possibility of moral responsibility. Orthodoxy dictates (...) an agency-first thesis, according to which free will is necessarily antecedent to moral responsibility. However, I present a number of arguments against this view, and in favor of an agency-last stance, according to which the concept of free will is dependent upon that of moral responsibility. I provide further support for my case in the form of new empirical evidence regarding the stable mode of inference used to attribute free will across moral contexts. These experimental results can be interpreted to imply the deflation of one of the longest-standing veridical paradoxes in experimental philosophy. Furthermore, the sole conceptual scheme found to be capable of modeling the experimental results is also capable of illuminating several classic works in the analytic philosophy of moral agency. (shrink)

Information is clearly vital to public health, but the acquisition and use of public health data elicit serious privacy concerns. One strategy for navigating this dilemma is to build 'trust' in institutions responsible for health information, thereby reducing privacy concerns and increasing willingness to contribute personal data. This strategy, as currently presented in public health literature, has serious shortcomings. But it can be augmented by appealing to the philosophical analysis of the concept of trust. Philosophers distinguish trust and trustworthiness from (...) cognate attitudes, such as confident reliance. Central to this is value congruence: trust is grounded in the perception of shared values. So, the way to build trust in institutions responsible for health data is for those institutions to develop and display values shared by the public. We defend this approach from objections, such as that trust is an interpersonal attitude inappropriate to the way people relate to organisations. The paper then moves on to the practical application of our strategy. Trust and trustworthiness can reduce privacy concerns and increase willingness to share health data, notably, in the context of internal and external threats to data privacy. We end by appealing for the sort of empirical work our proposal requires. (shrink)

In this paper I present an account of the rational abilities that make our decisions free. Following the lead of new dispositionalists, a leeway account of free decisions is developed, and the rational abilities that ground our abilities to decide otherwise are described in detail. A main result will be that the best account of the relevant rational abilities makes them two-way abilities: abilities to decide to do or not to do x in accordance with one’s apparent reasons. Dispositionalism about (...) rational abilities will be vindicated, since it helps to see why and how these two-way abilities entail an ability to decide otherwise and, thus, free will. (shrink)

This paper aims to investigate the temporal content of perceptual experience. It argues that we must recognize the existence of temporal perceptions, i.e., perceptions the content of which cannot be spelled out simply by looking at what is the case at an isolated instant. Acts of apprehension can cover a succession of events. However, a subject who has such perceptions can fall short of having a concept of time. Similar arguments have been put forward to show that a subject who (...) has spatial perceptions can fall short of having a concept of space. In both cases, it is the fact that perception is from a point of view which stands in the way of it constituting an exercise of a concept of how things are objectively. However, the paper also shows that the way in which perception is perspectival takes a different form in each of the two cases. (shrink)

The main aim of this paper is to investigate how sexist ideology distorts our conceptions of sexual violence and the hermeneutical gaps such an ideology yields. I propose that we can understand the problematic issue of hermeneutical gaps about sexual violence with the help of Fricker’s theory of hermeneutical injustice. By distinguishing between hermeneutical injustice and hermeneutical misfire, we can distinguish between the hermeneutical gap and its consequences for the victim of sexual violence and those of the perpetrator of such (...) violence. I then argue that perpetrators are both morally responsible and accountable for their acts, even if they are the result of a hermeneutical misfire. Ultimately, I show that with regard to sexual violence, we should opt for accountability to change the behaviour of the perpetrator and the social structure. Content warning: The paper discusses sexual violence and difficulties conceptualising experiences of such violence. (shrink)